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What's in store for NCR’s properties?

Company’s local footprint large despite recent moves

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By Margo Rutledge Kissell, Staff Writer Updated 1:57 AM Thursday, June 4, 2009

Amanda Wright Lane was thrilled when NCR Corp. decided to donate Hawthorn Hill — the Oakwood mansion Orville Wright called home for nearly 35 years — to the Wright Family Foundation in 2006.

The company had purchased the home in 1948 after it was put up for sale following the aviation pioneer’s death. NCR officials were “fantastic stewards” for nearly 60 years, said Wright Lane, great-grandniece of the Wright brothers.

There were many reasons why the company wanted to return it to the family with the hope of one day making it a National Park Service site, she said.

“We had no indication the gift was because they were slowly pulling out of Dayton,” she said Wednesday, June 3, one day after NCR officials announced it was moving its world headquarters and 1,250 jobs to an Atlanta suburb.

The property is one of several the company has sold or donated in recent years. It still maintains a large footprint locally, including its $31.4 million headquarters on nearly 54 acres on South Patterson Boulevard and nearby 33-acre Old River Park, which reopens Sunday under management of Dayton History after being closed for 11 years.

Brady Kress, the nonprofit’s president and chief executive officer, called it an asset he hopes the organization “will be able to share with the community for a long time.”

While NCR plans to sell its headquarters building, a company spokesman said he was unsure of its plans for other sites like Moraine Farm in Kettering, the home of industrialist Col. Edward Deeds. It’s where NCR Chairman and CEO Bill Nuti and visiting executives stayed while in Dayton.

“Certainly we’re very interested in (its future) because of the significance of Moraine Farm,” City Manager Mark Schweiterman said Wednesday, June 3.

The 8.6-acre property at 1233 W. Stroop Road is valued at $2.9 million, according to records from the Montgomery County Auditor’s Office.

The South Field, adjacent to the house, once served as the Experimental Station of the Dayton Wright Airplane Company, formed by Deeds and Charles F. Kettering in 1917.

It’s just one piece of NCR’s rich history in the community.

The NCR Archive

Kress said the nonprofit signed a five-year contract with NCR in August 2005, for it to preserve the NCR Archive at 224 N. St. Clair St.

“We’re working on an extension of (the contract),” Kress said, noting those talks started a few months ago.

Dayton History’s Web site calls the archive “a national treasure” that includes more than 350 wood and brass cash registers, machinery from the first factory and founder John H. Patterson’s desk and chair.

For more than three months in 1999, trucks traveled between NCR’s Building 28 (formerly located at the corner of South Patterson Boulevard and Stewart Street) and the Archive Center, bringing three million pieces of the collection to its new home.

UD gains former NCR sites

In January, 2008, the University of Dayton began demolition of Building 26, the site of NCR’s top-secret code-breaking operation during World War II.

Preservationists have urged UD to save the building and integrate its reuse with the university’s plans for the site, where NCR engineer and UD alumnus Joseph Desch worked to develop a Nazi codebreaking machine that’s credited with hastening the end of World War II.

UD contended the original Art Deco building’s historical luster had been lost over the years to heavy alterations and showed as evidence the Ohio Historic Preservation Office’s conclusion that the building did not appear to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

The 50-acre property was part of NCR’s $25 million sale to UD in 2005, giving Ohio’s largest private university an unparalleled opportunity to expand its campus and direct possible development nearby. The property runs from Brown Street to the Great Miami River.

NCR retained $7 million in participation rights in any commercial development on the land that included two buildings, two parking lots and two practice fields. But under a new agreement reached last December, NCR waived $5 million and UD paid $2 million for the remaining rights.

Other key NCR property sales:

• Sold 14 acres and a five-story building at 1611 S. Main St. to Cox Ohio Publishing, which located the Dayton Daily News there in early 2007.

• Sold Sugar Camp, a former software training site, in Oakwood, to a private investment group in 2006, and an adjacent 7-acre parcel to another private investment group. The 36-plus acres at the northwest corner of Far Hills Avenue and Schantz Boulevard will include a synagogue and a mix of office and commercial space as well as residential high-rises, condominiums and single-family homes.

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